Fantasies on wheels

“Leonard Williamson drives his dog around on his banked test track in Southport on a curved dash Oldsmobile in 1902”; from the book under review

“
Prediction is very difficult”, said that wise old bird Samuel Goldwyn
(perhaps apocryphally), “especially about the future.” Certainly, few people
forecast that Queen Victoria’s reign, in which almost all transport, as she
came to the throne in 1837, was undertaken by horse or boat, would stretch
out to the first sighting of petrol-powered motor cars on English roads in
1895 – “spewing clouds of dust and astounding passers-by”, as Kathryn A.
Morrison and John Minnis, the authors of Carscapes, note. Even fewer
could have predicted that the internal combustion engine would reshape lives
and landscapes far more than the steam engine ever did. The steam train, for
all the glory of, say, the Flying Scotsman – now the star of the National
Railway Museum at York – was a piece of intermediate technology, like the
fax machine. Speeding faster than any horse, trains reshaped the perception
of time and distance. But the car and the truck reshaped everything.

On English roads, Morrison and Minnis report, travel by bicycle reached its
peak in the 1890s; travel by train in the1920s. It was the car that
propelled the change. It was a private passion. From the start it was
perceived, and often bought, as a source of pleasure. Public travel by bus
passed its peak in the 1950s. Already by 1904, there were 13,302 car
licences in England; but by 2010 there were 24,095,536.

Where will this end? After all, since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927), practically every futuristic film or drawing has shown small
aircraft flitting above the cityscape. And, so far, fantasies about future
cities have at least as good a prediction record as any other kind of
analysis.

So far, fantasies about future cities have at least as good a prediction
record as any other kind of analysis

As Carscapes demonstrates, many of the changes wrought by cars were,
themselves, embodiments of one fantasy or another. And where the changes
failed, they were failures of imagination. Morrison and Minnis quote the
historian Jack Simmons, in 1947, seeing his adoptive city, Leicester,
stripped of its past in pursuit of engineers’, planners’ and architects’
dull-minded fantasies of a land fit for the car:

“In the course of the last 15 years – no more – the Old Town of Leicester has
been almost entirely destroyed. In the late 1950s its medieval street
pattern was clearly visible . . . . Now nearly all this has gone: not merely
the streets but their very names – Applegate Street, Blue Boar Lane,
Bakehouse Lane, Red Cross Street . . . . In their place we have a huge
swathe of concrete, taking the traffic through the city north and south,
with windy and desolate stretches, of concrete again, on either side of it.
The Old Town in its former state was grimy, and in many respects an
inefficient anachronism. Nevertheless it was full of interest, of oddity: it
was lovable and contained surprises. Not one of those things is true of its
successor. It has become a passage-way, a mere hyphen between larger units.”

Some historic monuments remained, but they were isolated and hard of access.

Nostalgia moves on. Both Morrison and Minnis are English Heritage historians. Carscapes
is their richly informative exploration of road transport buildings and
re-buildings (in England only). It springs from English Heritage’s “Car
Project”, with research carried out in 2008–10. Morrison and Minnis come
close to wringing their hands over the demolition in 2010 of the Gateshead
multi-storey car park (1969), which featured in the film Get Carter
(1971). In general, however, the authors say they “have attempted to remain
objective: neither to criticise nor to applaud the car and its diverse
impacts”.

The authors spend little time on the actual cars, though they open with an
enlightening chapter on the factories that made them. A map of Coventry in
1938, then called “the Metropolis of Motordom”, pinpoints twenty-one makes.
None is made in Coventry now. Several are only commemorated in used-car
forecourt displays or at the DIY Essex seaside village Jaywick Sands, which
named all its streets after British makes. In the long run, British
manufacturers lacked the brutal simplicity of Ford, which built Dagenham
into “the Detroit of Europe”, producing 100,000 cars a year, but then shut
it when the market changed. For more than twenty years (1932–55), Dagenham
and Coventry, along with the Longbridge (Austin) and Cowley (Morris) plants,
made Britain the second-biggest carmaker in the world, after the United
States. By 1956, Volkswagen was already nudging ahead.

Railway trains created or inflated entire English towns (Crewe, Swindon,
Derby, for example). Many thousands of people worked at rail jobs. But for
most people, their only serious contact with the rail industry lay in buying
a ticket. The car is not like that. At one level, it has created an entire
forest of fittings, accessories and amenities: from spark plugs to satnavs,
from roadhouses to Little Chefs. At another level, it has rebuilt the world
to suit itself. By the end of the twentieth century, as Morrison and Minnis
acknowledge, “the rural and urban landscape of England” was “reshaped around
the car”. In the countryside, a car-less life became all but impossible.
Meanwhile, towns were turned inside out, like an old glove, by the new
malls. The impact of cars increasingly narrowed down to the question of
where to put them. The fiercest local authority rows are over parking
spaces, charges and fines. Morrison and Minnis assert that “modern life
would quickly crumble if we could no longer park”. The most flourishing
parts of the British economy are huge sheds in truck-filled acres of parking
near a motorway junction, all serviced by online ordering.

The car has created an entire forest of fittings, accessories and amenities:
from spark plugs to satnavs, from roadhouses to Little Chefs . . . . It has
rebuilt the world to suit itself

Carscapes chronicles everything from the invention of cat’s eyes to the
appearance of floral roadside shrines. The multitude of photographs includes
a dinky 1922 petrol pump in Herefordshire (now listed as “probably the most
complete example of its type”), and an art deco multi-storey car park in
Soho, the first to be listed, in 2002. When built, this car park had a
canteen for chauffeurs and a separate café for owner-drivers. This little
social distinction has long gone, but the word “garage” itself retains an
after-echo, in its tiny puzzle of mixed pronounceability. The word is first
recorded in the English language in November 1900, Carscapes tells
us. It was announced that a “garage . . . where vehicles may be left” was
being erected for visitors to the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill. More than
a century later, the OED still lists three rival pronunciations:
gArridge (blunt and front-stressed), garAHzh (frenchified and end-stressed)
and gArrahzh (front-stressed but still with a touch of French). Who says
which, and why? It’s a battle that cries out for a dash of social
anthropology. But Morrison and Minnis shy away from such speculations.

The all-embracing changes thought necessary to keep the driver happy, and the
pedestrian in his or her place, have often come to pass long after they were
conceived. By the time the drawbacks were discovered, it tended to be too
late to stop the juggernaut of construction. So it was with that all-car
artefact, the motorway, which rightly has many pages and photographs in Carscapes.
In the early 1900s, the Conservative politician, A. J. Balfour and the
Fabian H. G. Wells both dreamed of car-only roads. Morrison and Minnis
remind us how bad the existing roads were: turnpike trusts, with their
tolls, had long been wound up, but nothing took their place. In the 1930s, a
team of British delegates went to Germany and drooled over Dr Todt’s
autobahns. In the 1950s, the apostle of motorways was Harold Macmillan’s
Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples. Working together, the two men had
delivered on an election-winning promise to build 300,000 houses a year. Now
was the moment for the next stage in going modern. For years, Marples’s only
public tribute was a spray-painted slogan across an early M1 bridge:
“Marples Must Go”.

The first significant road protest in England was the mid-1970s campaign to
abandon the London inner ring road, and the campaign against pulling down
Covent Garden. Both succeeded. Another, rural version emerged in the 1990s,
led by the “Dongas Tribe”. The Tribe admitted that they were “simply 15-odd
(very, very odd) people on a hill, with a goat, running out to stop two old
bulldozers”, as they fought the line of the Winchester bypass on the M3.
They lost the battle, but in the end they won the war. Apart from the even
more contested Newbury bypass, little of that kind has been built since.

The life of a car was, and is, peculiarly transient. Now that Britain no
longer has its own mass-production manufacturer, most cars arrive by ship.
In due course, 80 per cent of each car is re-exported as scrap. In 1965, the
first car crusher could handle eighteen old cars a day, and reduce them to a
block 24 inches by 12 by 22. Soon a newer crusher could swallow 1,500 cars a
day, reducing them to pieces the size of a man’s hand. Morrison and Minnis
tell us that the jargon term is ELV: End of Life Vehicle.

It has begun to seem a long time since the early rhapsodies about the car
(“every weekend a holiday”); the new quest for “heritage” (where would the
National Trust be without the car?); and the out-of-town supply of all kinds
of facility (ranging from the opera at Glyndebourne to road-edge sex shops
off the A1). The motor car, Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minnis stoically
conclude, is “a mass of contradictions”. But that, as their book
demonstrates, is part of the car’s abiding strength and fascination.

Paul Barker’s most recent books include Hebden Bridge: A sense
of belonging, 2012, and an e-book, A Crooked Smile, which
appeared last month.